Legendary military commander retired Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis is on a whirlwind publicity tour promoting his book Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, which he co-authored with Bing West. Washington Examiner senior writer Jamie McIntyre covered Mattis both when he was in uniform and during his stint as President Trump’s first defense secretary. The two spoke by phone last week, after McIntyre promised in an email that he wouldn’t ask the same dumb questions as everyone else, but instead would ask entirely new dumb questions. That apparently appealed to Mattis, who immediately called. The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and space.
Washington Examiner: I’m wondering about some of your judgments. You seem pretty confident after you’ve made a decision that you’ve made the right one. For instance, the account you give of how you were certain that you could’ve captured or killed Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora in 2001, even though your superiors never gave you the go-ahead.
Jim Mattis: You’re never sure about anything in warfare. If I gave that impression, that was probably incorrect on my part. But I would tell you this, I’d studied the Geronimo campaign. We had intelligence that said Osama bin Laden was in probably one of two valleys in Tora Bora, and there was basically two ways out. We had done a computerized visibility diagram, so we knew which mountain tops we could be on that would basically allow us to cut off retreat. You didn’t have to put a whole line of troops because it was a way to go from one— If you look at the old Crusader castles in Syrian desert, they could signal from one to another. They were all within sight of each other. There was a way to put these outposts in with snipers and mortars, machine gunners, and forward air controllers and artillery spotters, and then push up those two valleys with a couple of companies of troops, and I had plenty of troops. I could have inserted the outposts along the border by helicopter in the high country because we had helicopters that could go in at that altitude, the heavy CH-53 Echoes.
Washington Examiner: How sure are you that despite what other people thought, you’d have been able to capture bin Laden in those snowy mountains?
Jim Mattis: I had the historical example. We had the current intelligence, and I had the military capability to go in. It was not, I think, that others didn’t think we could do it. They thought that the [local Afghan fighters allied with the United States] were capable and could do it. And I didn’t think so because some of those elements were Tajik. This was a Pashtun area, and I just thought that considering the priority we had placed on getting Osama bin Laden, we should put everything into that fight up there. And I was not sufficiently persuasive.
Washington Examiner: In the book you do a nice job of explaining the problems you faced at whatever point of your career you were in, how you approached it, and how you came to a conclusion. But a lot of it is geared toward essentially vanquishing the enemy. How can people apply these concepts, which are essentially aimed at winning in battle, to winning in life?
Jim Mattis: It’s an excellent question because what I tried to do was put together a book that would help young people who are trying to lead a school district, or a city, or in a business corporate environment, or military. What are the techniques that worked for me? And, for example, most of the time when you’re in a competitive environment, let’s just say sports or the marketplace, business, the military, time is one of the most critical elements in anything you’re doing. You only have so long to collect information, there’s a lot of information and things you can’t control. So you have to make a decision. Opportunities open and shut quickly on the battlefield, the playing field, football field. So how do you organize to take advantage of it? Do you delegate the authority that you’ve prepared people to exercise, that you’ve rewarded them for exercising? You take your hand off the steering wheel. How many times have you heard of people who are stifled, people who have good ideas and they just don’t feel they can use their initiative? They don’t think the system allows them to do it. Those are the kind of things I think cut across any corporate culture. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. And in my book, I try to show how I tried to build a sense of ownership, build trust, build initiative, reward, because any institution gets the behavior it rewards.
Washington Examiner: I’ve read a lot of books on leadership written by retired generals and others. One of the books I read that impressed me was Hard Call: The Art of Great Decisions, written by the late Sen. John McCain with Mark Salter. Are you familiar with the book?
Jim Mattis: I am.
Washington Examiner: McCain opens the book with an anecdote about a prisoner of war in Vietnam. An Air Force pilot who was shot down is trying to make his way to safety and has to make a tough decision about whether to try to approach an American base in the daytime, when he might be spotted and captured by the North Vietnamese — or whether he needs to wait until nightfall, when he might be shot by the Americans who would think he’s attacking the base. He decides to go in the daytime and ends up getting shot in the leg and captured by the North Vietnamese. The point of the story is that sometimes, you can’t necessarily judge the quality of a decision by the outcome. That decision might’ve been the best decision he could make, but it just didn’t work out.
I was thinking about that when I was reading about the debate about what now has become conventional wisdom, namely that it was a big mistake to disband the Iraqi Army, to ban the Ba’athists who served Saddam Hussein, and fail to deploy enough troops to secure the country after the successful invasion.
And I’m just wondering if there’s an argument that had we done the opposite, kept the army together somehow, integrated some Ba’athists into the government, sent more troops, we still might have had the same outcome, an insurgency. And people would have said, “It should have been obvious. We kept too many of Saddam’s people around. Then we went in too heavy-handedly, which turned the population against us.”
Jim Mattis: Very good question. I think that when you look at what happened to the British when they went into Iraq in the 1920s, if you studied the uprising there, you can use history to ask the right questions. I’m not sure we asked the right questions. Further, if you go back to when [ancient Greek warrior] Xenophon’s army was marching into the land between the two rivers, Mesopotamia, which today we call Iraq, he talks about setting out to establish — he called it a city, we would call it a civilization — and he said, “If we don’t immediately take control, then the whole countryside will rise up against us.” Now I’m not saying history tells you what to do, but it at least tells you what to question. Why did the U.S. Army [after World War II] not say anybody who was in the Nazi party is forbidden from being part of the government? What if it was just some low-ranking streetcar conductor? I mean, eventually you have to deal with the reality of what you went into. And if you look at the planning done for post-conflict Iraq, I think it would be fair to say that there was not a sufficiently rigorous planning effort that went into it. Leaders have the responsibility to set the vision for the end state. I don’t think that was sufficiently historically informed.
Washington Examiner: How do we know that if we’d followed the course that you advocated in your book that we wouldn’t have still ended up with the same bad result?
Jim Mattis: While you wouldn’t know if it would have worked, at the time that their army was coming back into the barracks, we were initially holding what the British Army would call “regimental teas” with them and talking to them, [asking things such as] “What was it like fighting the Americans in the Gulf War versus fighting the Iranians?” We were starting to get military units and commanders that realized that we weren’t there to humiliate them. We weren’t there with an air of triumphalism, that we wanted to liberate them from Saddam Hussein, but that wasn’t the end of it. We needed them to take over again. And instead, you just banned the one group that’s trained — and they were trained, many of their troops were well trained, by the way — you disband them, and then you tell somebody who might’ve joined the Ba’ath party just because he wanted his daughter to go to university or something and that was the dominant party that he’s now beyond the pale. And he, by the way, isn’t going to be able to get his job back at the Ministry of Education or something. You know, it’s not that big of a surprise what happened coming out of that. Who knows if it would’ve worked our way?
Washington Examiner: So how is it that you’re able to, no matter what situation you’re facing, come up with some historical precedent that helps inform your thinking, even if it’s hundreds or even a thousand years ago?
Jim Mattis: Well, it’s because of the human factors. Human nature doesn’t change that much and much of war is reliant on the human factor. Technology changes, tactics change, but going into someone else’s country and expecting certain outcomes, that’s probably not consistent with what history tells you invading armies generally find. You have to really work at finding common cause. So the history of war of the human beings on this planet, reviewing literature, knowing a country’s art, their dance, that sort of thing, you can see where there’s common ground. You can see where there is uncommon ground. And one thing about reading, it does not permit what seems to be a great American pastime today, not in the military but in some arenas, of “victimhood.” We’re not victims. You can always figure out some solution. There’s something out there that can give you a mental model for how to get out of the jam you’re in.
Washington Examiner: Would you recommend that President Trump read your book? And if he does, what do you think he would take away from it?
Jim Mattis: I am not giving political advice right now. As far as do I want him to read the book? Well, I think anybody who’s in a leadership position that wants to see what worked for me can read the book and then see if any of it matches their challenges. But at the same time, everyone has to lead in their own way. And I’m just saying this is what worked for me. I’m not arrogant about it and saying this was the right way for everyone to go.
Washington Examiner: The other thing that strikes me about your book — and you know, as I’m reading, I’m highlighting with a yellow marker — is that I pretty much found a “Mattisism,” an aphorism, a maxim of some kind on every page. How’d you manage to do that? I mean, I could read some to you, they just pop out at me. It almost starts on page one. You write, “There’s a huge difference between making a mistake and letting that mistake define you.” I liked this one: “Speaking crisply or having a tight haircut did not make a leader.” That’s kind of pithy. Let’s see. Here’s one. “I can appear brilliant if I fight enemy leaders dumber than a bucket of rocks.” Did you just coin these over the years or do they just pop in your head or what?
Jim Mattis: A lot of the crazy ones do, but “No better friend, no worse enemy” is from a Roman general. “First do no harm” is from the physician’s oath. “Keep your honor clean” is from the Marine Hymn. When I’m talking to the troops, I’ve always tried to find common ground where I could. I don’t have an original thought in my brain, and that’s not being overly modest. I just read. And I used to hitchhike, and I could hear people’s stories. You know, the cross-country truck driver picks you up and tells you about when he was in the army in Korea, or the night nurse coming off at nine in the morning. She picks you up and tells you why she went into nursing and what makes her little town of 400 people special to her. I’ve just always been curious about this sort of stuff. I think it just comes from, being engaged with people and enjoying it. It’s the reason I stuck around for so long in the Marines, I just enjoyed being around those young people.
Washington Examiner: In your letter to your troops in 2004 when your 1st Marine Division had been ordered back to Iraq to relieve the Army’s 82nd Airborne in the Sunni Triangle in Al Anbar province, you write: “It’s appropriate that we relieve them. When it’s time to move a piano, Marines don’t pick up the piano bench — we move the piano.” Was that an original thought or did you get that from some Roman general?
Jim Mattis: No. I don’t know where that one came from, but I’ve always thought of the Marines as an institute with no institutional confusion. When it’s time to go, you go using my [fake] Latin “totus porcus,” which means “whole hog.” You go into the fight, you give it everything you have. And if the fiercest province is Al Anbar, then you take Al Anbar. If the fiercest province is Helmand, you go into Helmand. You take Iwo Jima. You don’t try to take Iwo Jima. It’s that formative experience that just kind of brings out those kinds of things. I honestly can’t tell you where it comes from, although probably I read it somewhere. I dreamed it up some time on the long run.
Washington Examiner: Well, sometimes the person who’s credited with a quotation is not the first person to say it, but it’s the person who said it best.
Jim Mattis: Yeah, exactly. And I don’t deserve much credit for these. I’ve, like I said, I don’t have any original thoughts. These are all from someone else probably. I just integrated them in my own way, you know?
Washington Examiner: So you’ve been doing this book tour. Are you surprised at all at the level of questions you keep getting asked about the current president? Were you ready for that?
Jim Mattis: I was prepared for it because you can’t turn on the news nowadays anywhere in America and not see how consuming — I would call it — “the political magnets” are. They draw everything to the political issues of the day. However, having started the book in 2013, with no idea that I would be anything other than a retired Marine, no idea that President Trump would ever run for office, no idea that I’d be the secretary of defense, it’s still a book that was written about the lessons I learned in the military. So I’ve tried to turn the questions back toward what I’ve written about. Random House was kind enough to give me a two-year hiatus on the contract I’d written, but I had to deliver the book.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
